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OBSCENE EXTREME 2012:

RETURN TO BATTLEFIELD TRUTNOV

Trutnov, Czech July 2012

by Ryan Bartek with pics by Curby

You know you’re back in the thick of it when the opening celebrations present a sort of Special Olympics of beer consumption complete with handcuff races, shopping cart derbies & vomit contests. When barely an hour after those deranged past times you then find yourself cyclone-engulfed by an impromptu circle pit of hammered Eastern European metal guys outside the beer tent, all of them riled to madness of a DJ spinning Sepultura. In sloppily accented broken English they holler slogans, translating Max Cavalera’s already superbly broken-English caveman vocals into untold dimensions…

It’s “Freak Fest,” Wednesday the 11th of July, the glorious opening extravaganza when all attendees greet their fellow maniacs. For the next 3 days, the sleepy town of Trutnov, Czech is hit hard by the rumblings of OBSCENE EXTREME 2012, which renders the tightest live lineup of grindcore imaginable. It’s becoming an international cauldron due to it’s everlasting reputation, and the intercontinental grind family is in full bloom. In fact it’s probably the most (literally) family friendly metal fest out there, with children roaming around all day amongst their tattooed, leather clad parental units…

At least during the day, because by night the werewolves prowl. As an instance to this principle, Freak Fest took a twisted turn when the beer tent hosted a live S&M show. A few ladies in leather were guided around on all fours like submissive pets, locked in a cage and then one by one strapped down & paddled for nearly an hour each…

That was a balance – the Antifa radicals & the very not politically correct grinders, all kind of sitting there transfixed at this screaming from delighted sex slaves. Things lightened up soon after with the appearance of the “Mustache Bar.” You spin a giant wheel like a game show, it turns up the mustache design which the MC’s will then shave into the top of your head while you’re locked into a medieval stock & forced to sing bad karaoke. We’ve already had “can’t read my/can’t read my pokerface” balanced w/ “I’m a Barbie Girl in a Barbie World” in screaming grind delivery…

Thursday’s official first day began with Guttalax, launching onward this barrage of 69 bands in 3 days on 1 stage. Same back-line all the way through, only change is the guitar & bass (save for the few headliners of course). In-between sets is usually 15 minutes of the OEF gang playing tunes from Lawrence Welk, oddball surf & the Pulp Fiction Soundtrack. The stage-diving goes on continuously in the most ludicrous of costumes & protective gear & naked people are everywhere, caked in mud…

Guttalax came right out, setting the tone for the fest with pig-squealing, grind stomping death metal. They were properly attired, wearing sewer crew hazard suits smeared in feces pudding. Germany came next to represent, with 5 STABBED 4 CORPSES ravaging a potent death/grind brew. Sometime during their set it began raining heavy, as per usual, creating moats & rivers of that particularly reddish-brown Czech mud. It continued pouring through France’s MASSIVE CHARGE and Tunisia’s HUMAN SCUM – both of which relayed a hearty blast of old-school grind…

Canada’s HEAD CHARGER reset the vibe, pummeling a grind/death variation with hard-rocking Zeke undertones, giving the Brazilian PLAGUE RAGES an upper hand back into grind world. It was the next performance that brought everyone up to speed in neck-break frenzy – the rain slowed to a drizzle, and the brilliantly titled SPLATTERED MERMAIDS from Sweden had honed a technical assault of death/grind. EARDELETE gave us one more firm strangling of gore-grind before old school Swede crust punks VON BOOM gave us a classic dose of filthy, catchy punk rock…

Czech Hentai worshiping grind destroyers JIG-AI came next, launching the evening into the territory of headlining acts. JIG-AI was a real standout – they were on it. SPLITTER came next, giving exactly what they always promise, with a death metal chaser from MALIGNANCY. As the audience seethed from this carnivorous assault, WOLFBRIGADE stormed in to mop the floor with us all. Raging d-beat deathcrust performed its magic, only to be trumped by the forever tight SUFFOCATION. Sadly vocalist Frank Mullen couldn’t make it, leaving a worthy replacement that looked like a 13 year old in 1973 that was asked to fill in for Ozzy during the ultra Sabbath reign. He was accepted by all, and the results were smooth…

Cephalic Carnage brought an odd flavor, as they always do successfully, especially when being followed by ORIGIN who drags these mystic bouts of technicality to equivalents of medieval torture. It was like a the white filling of an Oreo turned spatial vortex, collapsing both ends in on themselves. Like this warped, Stephen Hawking explosion of reformulation & getting spit out like chewed Somali caad…

As the audience wandered around dazed from these musical gymnastics, the HELL SHOW began. Within 30 minutes there were 6 men hanging from hooks jabbed through the flesh of the back in suspension, all of them dressed as pigs or chickens or S&M people – all strung up by a mad butcher covered in fake blood before he himself was tackled by the zombie-like freaks, jabbed through & hoisted into the beyond…

Day Three – Friday The 13th & many of the audience are sporting Voorhees hockey masks. First up is S.C.A.T., a Russian gore-grind outfit with chainsaw guitar tones. March of The Hordes follow, dropping a tight mix of Swedish death metal before UK grinders EVISORAX delivered a searing slab of entrails. Old school grind came next with Italy’s Buffalo Grillz (who actually take their name from a Steakhouse chain)…

The only Saudi Arabian grindcore band CREATIVE WASTE then gave us a battering ram of butchery to continue the international aspect of the fest. In said spirit along came the trail of Ecuadorian death group ENTE, Argentinean grind trio SOCIAL SHIT, Brazil’s take-no-prisoners thrash wrecker ANDRALLS & Turkey’s only grind act SAKATAT which by all means live up to their reputation…

A heaping dose of Swede crust stormed onward via M-40 and into the hallowed legendry of Deuthschland grinders WOJCZECH. One of the real standouts for most the people came next under the inauspicious titled WEEKEND NACHOS (a name that was made by abstract jumbling of words, not any specific reason). They had thick sludgy breakdowns through a fog of powerviolence, bashing with grooves as much as blasts. Germany’s KEITZER came next, laying down further foundations of grind right into SPASM, the Czech conquerers. Belgium’s LENG T’CHE took no prisoners, leading up to Singapore’s DEMISOR and WORMROT. While DEMISOR was solid, WORMROT gave one of the best grind performances I’d ever seen. They were like composers of riot, conducting the audiences body charges through total psychological grind domination. The response alone solidified their position in OEF legendry…

French legion BENIGHTED took the unsightly job of trying to cope with a follow up to WORMROT but showed no signs of fatigue. They earned a huge crowd response which left the vibe well open for DISCHARGE, the godfathers of d-beat crust. I wasn’t expecting much for this reformed unit of veterans, but then they came out with the vocalist from Varukers and were unrelenting in their output. They just beat the piss out of everyone there…

The night grew dark, the stage lit softly with neon hues. It was time for the reunited NASUM, doing a farewell tour with ROTTEN SOUND’s Keijo Niinimaa stepping up to the mic. It was one of the moments, so pure, so devastatingly acute that it’s easier to summon an image then to translate it. The ghosts were laid to rest, and we were left craving more…

Exhumed for some reason couldn’t make the concert, so the rebound worked in the favor of VOMITORY, who otherwise might have been overlooked. They were a great example of a band you are fine with on record but you would never expect to completely harvest a crowd in such an absolutist manner. Holland’s FUBAR belted out some razor sharp grind before we lurched into the Neanderthal slamming & guttural death metal bashing of Italy’s Vulvectomy. Washington DC’s COKE BUST gave a much needed injection of grinding speed before REPUKED’s death punk led way to a savage night of intoxicated bodies passed out all over the lawn, outside of tents, beer cups smashed like ripped bouquets of plastic flowers…

Saturday, July 14th & no one wants it to end. The day opens with a duel Czech onslaught of crust crushers 6MAS and thrashy hardcore act STOLEN LIVES. Next to South America, where Brazil’s BAIXO CALAO laid down some slaughtering grind, and then to Sweden, where NECROMORPH really woke everyone up completely with their versatile mix of death/crust & blackened grind. Hometown Trutnov thrash marauders EXORCIZPHOBIA sliced it up next, followed by other Czech locals CARNAL DIAFRAGMA. Bulgarian gore-grinders COCKLUSH dropped some major pig-squealing action before the Carcass-inspired but fully developed TOOLS OF THE TRADE came front and center, ripping apart eardrums with machine gun precision.

German oldschool posse SANITYS DAWN restarted the flow of grind which led like a toxic river into the mouth of BLOOD I BLEED from Nederland. They quickly regurgitated their own specific impulse, passing the ball to Portuguese death/grinders GROG. Things then hit the jugular of crust/hardcore with the Swedish armada BAD DREAMS ALWAYS before Deutsch grind stalwarts DEAD leveled the playing field…

The French prog-gore assailants SUBLIME CADAVERIC DECOMPOSITION tailored a sutured mess of fleshy stumps, while INTERNAL SUFFERING belted out a Colombian inferno of brutal death metal. When EXTINXTION OF MANKIND couldn’t make the bill, JIG-AI stepped in to give us another dose of Hentai hatred. Swedish death perfectionists DEONICAL swooped in before the grind/death juggernauts LOOKING FOR AN ANSWER gave us their all c/o Spain…

Moments before HOUWITSER took the stage, I took a quick look around at my fellow combatants. Everyone was bloodied & bruised, dripping with sweat & glee. One kid standing next to me – this naked, 18 year old crust punk kid with rat-tail dreadlocks & a giant, dripping welt above his eyebrow – looks down, grabs his dick, leans his face into a stream of piss, urinates all over himself, into his beer, gulping mouthfuls. He staggers back up, looks blurringly to the side, and slams the half piss/half beer cup down his throat without a thought or care. The odd thing wasn’t that he did this, but that others saw & didn’t even bother to take a second glance. Drunk naked guy turns around and starts howling at the stage, begging for loudness…

HOUWITSER come on, vocalist in a ski-mask, playing a decisive, clear, slick & uncompromising form of death metal heavy on the riffs, not just the technicality of playing them fancy. Marching up next was BLOOD, a band one would first dismiss as non-clever in band name. However, having started in 1986, these German anarcho-grinders gave a hunkering cannibal feast of death metal avalanche. The UK’s grind/crust squad BLOCKHEADS gave a rousing performance, soon followed by ASPHYX.

ASPHYX had ambiance on their side – the night had grown frigidly cold, and everything was wet. Every breath was of steam, and through the increasing darkness the closest representative of a sun we had was their strong white logo burning through the blackness. Everyone howled to the moon in unison, and whipped about in a frenzy whose source was of no great mystery…

The German power trio YACOEPSAE bludgeoned their way through the follow up, leaving Portland, Oregon’s own POISON IDEA to make the grade. POISON IDEA began by playing their harder stuff feeling like they needed to specialize in order to win over the crowd. Instead, the audience began screaming for solidly punk hits of the past, and the band obliged. The kept up the jukebox route, playing whatever people kept screaming. A lot of hits from Kings of Punk soon followed…

The show was rounded off by a three prong grind/death attack from CAD, INTO SICKNESS & the mighty BOWELFUCK, but like most, I could barely even stand anymore. I made my way down the mud trenches, down the cobblestone hill, back through the beer tent where the Mustache Bar was again in operation. Where clumps of freshly cut hair lay strewn about in clumps, sitcking to peoples shows & getting further mired into the dirt. Where, one man continued screaming into the microphone, over & over: “Dancing Queen, Own-leee-sev-ven-teeeeen…

I walked past bodies slumped on the ground, the never ending clusters of Europeans babbling all sorts of nonsense; past the German mob hanging in a BBQ tent where everyone had glowsticks and sang “Macarena”; past the mini-vans blaring Dying Fetus & onward into the starkly black night, the freezing July night, again through the tent complexes, tripping again over nylon ropes staked to the ground & clanging my sneakers through land-mines of crushed beer cans & deformed plastic; back, back, all the way to the foot of my tent located not so far from the dreaded & unholy “pee woods.” I slunk into my lair, wrapped myself in sleeping bag to contemplate the only raging consideration in my mind which now burned like a radioactive Candiru…

In 2013 the OBSCENE EXTREME is branching out across the globe. With the assistance of the admirable grind Illuminati, the armada of OEF worldwide is helping Curby & the Czech crew set up FOUR INTERCONTINENTAL CONCERTS. Yes, this daring, calamitous mission is 100% true – starting next year you will see the birth of OBSCENE EXTREME AMERICA, OBSCENE EXTREME ASIA & OBSCENE EXTREME AUSTRALIA. It’s so great to have the America one in Mexico!! As in The Americas, not “America,” haha. And also Indonesia, where the cops have re-education centers for punks/grinders. Brilliant! Curby, you’re a fucking maniac!! Cheers!!

Until OEF 2013,

– Ryan Bartek —

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**Ryan Bartek is a freelance journalist, road junkie & all around freak. His new book “FORTRESS EUROPE (The Big Shiny Prison Vol. II)” is a 222 page odyssey which covers his journeys through the European Underground in 2011. FORTRESS EUROPE is a FREE PDF download at this location: http://ryanbartek.angelfire.com/blog/ <contact: ryanbartek@hotmail.com>